Caterham: We can be reasonably pleased

20 April, 2013

Charles Pic

Drivers report from qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix, Round 4 of the 2013 Formula 1 world championship, at Sakhir.

Charles Pic: “I’m pretty happy with where we finished today. We’d obviously have liked to be a little higher up the grid but with the package we have here in Bahrain I think we got as much as we could today in quali, so we can be reasonably pleased. We have a couple of new parts here which have definitely helped us make some progress, and after a good FP3 we were well set for quali. Yesterday the car had quite a bit of understeer which is pretty much a direct result of putting on updates at the back of the car, but the changes we made overnight gave me a much more balanced car and the final lap time today in Q1 showed the progress we’ve made since last week. Now we need to carry that pace into tomorrow’s race and having seen relatively good deg levels on the long runs we could have an interesting fight with a few cars ahead.”

Giedo van der Garde: “For me that was a decent qualifying session and I’m happy with where we finished up, considering the fact I’m in the same car we’ve raced since Australia without the new parts Charles has been running here in Bahrain. Overall I’m pleased for the whole team as his laptime today is a sign of what we have to come and the amount of hard work everyone’s putting in to show how we can perform. In Spain I’ll have the same updates as my teammate and that’ll obviously mean I’ll be able to compete at the level he is, but for today I got nearly everything out of the car on that final lap and I think I can play an important role in the race tomorrow on a track that we’re clearly looking OK on.”